On how the city-state is positioning itself as a door to South-east Asia and a hub for cross-border collaboration What advantages does Singapore offer tech companies seeking a springboard into ASEAN? PETER ONG: Innovation in South-east Asia is at an inflection point. The average age of the region’s 640m-strong population is 30, and a growing level of consumption power characterises…
The Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) has sought to stimulate a rebound in the economy by cutting domestic interest rates, following a slowdown linked to the Easter terrorist attacks. At its meeting on May 30, the CBSL’s Monetary Board cut its benchmark rate by 50 basis points, to 7.5%. It also cut the standard lending facility rate offered to commercial lenders by 50 basis points, to 8.5%. The…
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Sri Lanka is set to break ground on the first stage of the Colombo Light Rail Transit (LRT) project, a major development designed to ease congestion and improve connectivity in the capital. On March 14 Patali Champika Ranawaka, the minister of megapolis and western development, announced that preliminary construction work on the 15.8-km LRT link between Malabe and Fort/Pettah would begin in the…
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On October 26, 2018 President Maithripala Sirisena rescinded the mandate of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to lead the government. Although the Prime Minister Wickremesinghe was reinstated on December 16, the constitutional crisis weakened business sentiment and impacted already slowing growth. The economy grew by 3.3% year-on-year (y-o-y) for the first nine months of 2018, with the rate…
Companies categorised as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) constitute around 75% of all businesses in Sri Lanka, making them a crucial component of the economy. Boosting this vital area, both in term of raw size and contribution to value added, is thus a vital part of policy, with recent times seeing major initiatives launched with this goal in mind. June 2018 saw the launch of Enterprise…
Sri Lanka’s third quarter 2018 GDP growth dipped to a record eight-year low of 2.9% – compared to 3.3% in the third quarter of 2017 and 3.7% in the second quarter of 2018 – leading to a cumulative expansion of 3.3% for the first nine months of 2018, which was expected to continue to the end of the year. The struggle was primarily evident in the industrial segment, which rose by a mere…
By the time Sri Lanka reaches the end date of Vision 2025, its current mid-term development plan, it will have been nearly half a century since the country first embraced the ideas of market liberalisation in 1977. Sri Lanka is therefore now in a position to take the long view on liberalisation, having been one of the first post-colonial Asian countries to embark in this direction. However,…
Sri Lanka’s banking sector is currently implementing major changes in the way business is done, due mainly to the rollout of Basel III and International Financial Reporting Standard 9 (IFRS 9) regulations. Stricter capital requirements are pushing non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs) to consolidate, while a host of new rules are being collated for the country’s emerging financial technology…
